While many vendors used this week’s Seybold Seminars event in New York to announce new products, update their products, or offer solutions for publishing, content management, or digital rights management, many others used the event to help get the word out about products or services they already offer. Here’s a roundup of a few of the smaller vendors exhibiting at this year’s event.
Artwork Systems Inc. showed Nexus, which it bills as “the ultimate pre-press workflow solution.” Comprised of three main modules, NexusImport, NexusProcessor and NexusRIP, the solution has been developed to accept input from and produce output to a variety of industry formats. It works with PostScript 3, PDF 1.3, TIFF/IT, 1-bit TIFFs, copydot data, EPS files and more.
NexusManager provides workflow management on Macs using TCP/IP, and provides e-mail notification and the ability to launch NexusEdit if last-minute corrections need to be made. NexusWebWay enables customers to submit jobs, preflight, approve and download PDFs using a Web browser, while NexusProcessor handles all content-related automatic processing. Other modules are offered as well.
Creatas offered up its royalty-free stock resources. The company offers photographs and footage on a wide variety of subjects published on CD-ROM, along with lots of color EPS illustrations.
DAX Archiving Solutions, now a subsidiary of Torque Systems Inc. (see below), showed its line of high-capacity archiving products. The company’s products include DVD-R and DVD-RAM based appliances that are powered but Sun servers. The products are compatible with Mac, Windows and UNIX file systems and in some cases can be scaled to store hundreds of terabytes of data which can then be searched and retrieved using Web browser clients.
Gluon showed off its suite of applications and plug-ins, which it bills as “software robots for publishing professionals.” Gluon’s line includes QuarkXPress XTensions, InDesign plug-ins and standalone applications.
Its products include ProScale, a Quark and InDesign add-on that provides extensive scaling functionality for items, selections, pages, or whole documents; ColorBreaker, an automated, accurate color and FPO markup tool; DocuSlim, an image optimization tool for Photoshop; XpressImage, which exports elections, pages or spreads as pictures in various file formats like TIFF, EPS, GIF, and JPEG; and much more.
Kacis showed off its e-book authoring system, Kacis Publisher and Kacis Writer. As the names imply, the tools enable users to write, layout and publish e-books for Windows and Macintosh systems. They also offer Kacis Cabinet, which they bill as a “knowledge bank server” that enables users to browse, search and use documents of various formats — like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF.
Markzware was on hand to show of its preflight solutions and to highlight products from other vendors built using its technology, such as the online preflight solutions developed by Happymacs.com. FlightCheck Classic is the company’s preflighting tool, which handles Microsoft Word files as well. Techno Design also used a shared appearance with Markzware to highlight its line of QuarkXPress XTensions, including Speller XT, Job Time XT, RTF Import XT, XT Batch and much more.
Torque Systems Inc. told MacCentral that it has more than a decade of experience providing network and storage solutions to the Mac graphics market. The company presented its line of storage and file transfer products aimed at the publishing and pre-press markets. The company’s line includes FibreChannel and SCSI160-based RAID arrays from BigStorage, DAX2’s archiving solutions (see above) and SGI Origin-based RIPs.
Torque also offers live content management through its MediaBeacon and BrightVu solutions. The newest version sports WEb-based sticky note annotation, online image cropping, and delegated administration features. The products work hand-in-hand with Helios, Xinet and NT-based workflow servers. The company noted that its latest workflow packages work with OS 9 and OS X as well.
Traxxis showed of masterTRAKKER, a FileMaker Pro-based project management tool created for the graphics industry. The software has been developed to help designers, print brokers and pre-press and print professionals to help manage their business.
masterTRAKKER provides features like quoting, scheduling, job ticket, time and material tracking, job costing and reporting, purchase orders, invoicing and more. The software supports workgroups of up to 250 users. Traxxis said that the database could be customized to suit specific client needs as well. It’s easily scalable, compatible with Windows and Mac OS (since it’s a FileMaker Pro system), and integrates with the Web and ODBC databases, as well.
The Virtual Training Company (VTC) offered up info on its line of software training CDs. The company doesn’t specifically focus just on the publishing industry, although it does offer a ton of courseware related to Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Illustrator and other graphics and page layout apps. It also covers productivity software like Office, multimedia software like Director and much more.